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Annecy Festival
A Few Words from Monsieur le Délégué Artistique
I
t’s always a pleasure to catch up with Marcel Jean, the well-respected artistic director of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. The Canadian producer, director and author, who has been leading the festival since 2013, gave us the scoop on this year’s highly anticipated event in a recent email interview:
So, how does it feel to be launching the 2022 edition of Annecy? After an online edition in 2020 and a hybrid one in 2021, it feels great to be back for a real on-site edition of the festival. 2019 was an incredible year for Annecy, with a record of attendance and an historic selection, so we see 2022 as the continuity of 2019, after the pandemic parenthesis. We can already notice how the filmmakers, producers and studios are eager to be all together again. What are some of your personal can’t-miss highlights this year? It is always the toughest question to answer, because we believe so strongly in all the presentations, in all the films we select … Let’s say we are very excited to welcome Joe Dante in Annecy to talk about the new animated series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. And the Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse presentation will certainly be a do-not-miss. On a very personal basis, I am a huge fan of Robert Valley’s and Masaaki Yuasa’s work, so I am very excited by their presence in Annecy this year. We are very proud to present, as a European premiere, the director’s cut of Yonfan’s No. 7 Cherry Lane. The original version of the film was awarded in Venice in 2019 and we were supposed to screen the director’s cut in Annecy 2020. The screening was delayed, and Yonfan — who is a great artist with an incredibly sophisticated mind —will be a jury member in 2022. Sorry, but we have to ask you this question every year! What is your take on the animated shorts selection in 2022? They are longer than ever … No joke! It is becoming an issue because we’ve selected fewer short films than ever this year. If this trend continues in the future, it will change the way we build a short films competition. Apart from that, the questions of equity and diversity are part of the agenda. We were very happy to
Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics
No. 7 Cherry Lane
realize the proportion of short professional films directed or co-directed by women. It is basically 50%. In fact, we are already reaching the next step: More and more filmmakers (especially in the student films competition) are questioning the binary classification of the directors. We have to rethink the way we are dealing with those statistics. The film Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics, by Canadian
Indigenous filmmaker Terril Calder, represents a crucial trend which consists of the reappropriation of their cultural elements by the First Nations. It is great to realize that these questions are emerging from different parts of the world, from people who were confronted by different types of oppression and colonization.
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jun|jul 22
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